As disc drives are made increasingly smaller, it becomes difficult to form a disc drive mounting base out of a single component or material that can be economically shaped to provide properly aligned functional surface for receiving disc drive internal components. In particular, as the housing becomes thinner, it is increasingly difficult to maintain alignment, particularly parallelism, between mounting surfaces for spindle motors and actuator pivots. There is a desire to combine thin metal parts and plastic parts to form a housing assembly. It is found however, that high shrinkage rates of plastic parts after molding tends to distort or warp thin metal parts so that mounting surfaces on the metal parts are not adequately aligned.
A method and a mounting base are needed that combine thin metal parts with plastic parts in a way that reduces distortion of the thin metal parts. Embodiments of the present invention provide solutions to these and other problems, and offer other advantages over the prior art.